Plan Your Oscar Party With Our Recipe Blowout: 9 Themed Menus

The Academy Awards are coming up on Sunday. Whether you're planning a blowout Oscar-watching party or just kicking it with a few friends, here are some menus that are inspired by the nominees for Best Picture.

Image: miss karen via Flickr

Sit back, have a drink, eat a tasty meal, and queue up Twitter (#oscarsnark seems appropriate). Snarking on the fashions, booing or applauding the winners, or just counting the times the camera goes back and forth among Jennifer Aniston, Brad Pitt, and Angelina Jolie is so much more fun with friends.

Zero Dark Thirty

This movie starts with the anguished calls from people trapped inside the World Trade Center and ends with a gripping scene--shot in virtual real time--of the raid on Bin Laden's compound. Spoiler: Bin Laden dies. I wouldn't recommend this as a first-date movie unless both of you happen to be seasoned CIA operatives.

Zero Dark Thirty is full of dark, depraved moments of suspense and tension. It's very Hitchcockian in that even the "normal" scenes can make you wary and tense. If you saw the movie, you were probably gripping your seat with a racing pulse the whole time. You're going to want something to balance that. I suggest a spread of food coma-inducing comfort food.

Image: Black Bottom Banana Cream Bars courtesy of Mouth from the South

I love romantic movies that are strange and almost absurd. And while I haven't yet seen this movie, any movie that can combine rabid and OCD Philadelphia Eagles fans, running in garbage bags, Hemingway, ballroom dancing, a compassionate yet somewhat realistic view of mental illness, and a love connection between two broken people is a movie I want to see. Plus, when you have Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, and Robert DeNiro in a movie, you're going to be entertained.

The Eagles football team show up a lot more often in this movie than they did in the "Win" column in 2012, and Bradley Cooper's mom is constantly making "crabby snacks and homemades" for them to eat during the games. This menu wouldn't be complete without some foods from Philly. I'm including recipes for Philly Cheesesteaks and Butterkuchen. People of Philadelphia, please don't ask for my head on a stick if they're not the "right" version. And I am not even going to touch the Pat’s vs. Geno’s debate.

For the cocktail, it has to be a Hemingway Daiquiri. And whatever you do, do not play Stevie Wonder's 'My Cherie Amour' while making or eating this meal.

A menu for the movie Lincoln presents some challenges. I thought about featuring foods popular in Illinois, but President Lincoln seems much too noble to be noshing on a Chicago-style hot dog, and he was certainly too busy to sit down for a four-hour meal at Alinea. I also considered pitting a Yankee-themed dinner against a Southern-themed feast. This seemed like a marvelous way to pretend to be all-inclusive while simultaneously offending everyone.

One of the things that I found interesting in doing research on President Lincoln was that there is a little bit of controversy about his diet. Some people say he was very indifferent to food. Others say that he enjoyed good food, but was so preoccupied with the weighty matters of the day that he never complained about the food he was served.

Some facts that aren't in dispute are that President Lincoln loved honey, nuts, and apples. He loved chicken fricassee with biscuits so much that his wife once hired a cook because that was the lady's specialty. Abe was also a teetotaler, but I honestly can't imagine this dinner without a cocktail of some kind. It's a wonderful menu to eat while watching Lincoln or before attending a play.

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